Harry the Platypus was more than a little displeased at his current situation. A native of Australia, Harry had been whisked to a Canadian zoo on a very special plane when he was four years old. That wasn’t too bad. His enclosure was pleasant, and food was much easier to come by. There was even a lady platypus named Virginia, but she had died soon after her arrival. Life wasn’t perfection back at the zoo—Harry could have done with a bit of freedom—but it was a great deal better than his life with the Funny Lady. Funny Lady kept poking him.
What Harry wanted to do was cut into the space between the worlds and make his way back to Australia across the great, bizarre landscape of In-Between. Once in a while, a big, yellowy-brown baa-ing thing would accost him, but there were other platypuses in In-Between. Lady platypuses. Shivers of excitement ran down Harry’s body, right to the ends of his webbed feet. He could have everything he wanted, if only he wasn’t in that blasted cage. If only the Funny Lady let him out.
The door opened. Funny Lady walked in, the hateful poking stick clutched in her hand. She kneeled down to examine Harry. “Thi incek?” she said sweetly. “Rimin etherit tradcen!” It was perhaps another sign of Funny Lady’s insanity, Harry thought. She spoke to him in her mysterious human tongue, as if he could ever understand her.
“El,” Funny Lady crooned, poking Harry. “El, mel atpuca.”
The platypus tried in vain to cut between worlds. It wasn’t working. Just like the zoo enclosure, the cage would not allow him to create a hole that was quite big enough. His holes did satisfy Funny Lady, though. She smiled as she muttered things and swung her arms around, directing streams of golden particles to swirl around her body. This display continued for a few minutes before she grew tired.
“Em riperist, mel atpuca,” she said as she shut off the lights, plunging Harry in darkness again.
All in all, the zoo was decidedly better.
There was something slightly frightening about Red. A nameless fear always gripped Roger when he saw her sidle into the club, immaculately dressed and clearly ready for some excitement. Perhaps it was the way that she always listened to him. Other women tended to skip him over for somebody more attractive, but Red would go straight for plain little Roger, and never so much as glance at another man while he spoke. Her eyes would be trained on his face, observing every little muscle twitch. Roger had a feeling that if he asked Red how many times he had blinked last Tuesday, she would have given him a completely accurate answer.
It seemed odd that Red would take such an interest in a weedy, computer-obsessed nerd, even though he was filthy rich. A part of Roger was very suspicious of her. Sadly, that part was overridden by a more primal area of his brain. That is to say, the part that realised that this was a very—er, attractive woman who seemed to cling to his every word. Sure, her eyes were scarily intense, and chances were, she was completely insane, but nobody would ever laugh at Roger after seeing him with Red.
“Tell me more about your, ah, what is it called? The soft wearing,” Red purred. That was the other thing about her. She didn’t speak. She purred, like a cat, or the engine of a particularly cool car, and with just enough of an accent to seem pleasantly exotic.
Roger blushed. “It’s not too interesting.”
“I think it is. It’s made you very rich, hasn’t it?”
“Where are you from, Red?” he asked, hoping to steer away from that topic. Red was clearly not the sort of person who could talk about computers and not make him cringe.
“What?”
“Where are you from?”
She seemed slightly uncomfortable. After thinking for a moment, she said, “Um. Slovakia. Yes, Slovakia. It is a very nice country, yes, with lovely—er, coast. Yes. I come from the eastern coast of Slovakia.” Red grinned. Roger blinked at her for a few seconds.
“Um, Slovakia is land-locked.”
“Is it?”
He nodded. “I would know. I was born there.”
“Oh, well, I mean—er, Armenia.”
“Armenia doesn’t have a coast either, Red.”
Red laughed heartily. “A coast? Not a coast, my dear Roger! I meant an—um, a toast! I was born soon after my—uh, my mother, she ate toast. And that… um.” Her voice faltered. There was an awkward silence as the pair stared at each other. Roger wondered if she could hear the alarm bells and sirens blaring in his head. At last, in an effort to salvage the situation, Red asked, “You want to go somewhere more private?”
Roger agreed after a moment’s thought. If she wasn’t crazy, she was at least unbelievably stupid, but that didn’t make her any less attractive. The rest of the club watched enviously as she led him out into the cool night air. It took about fifteen minutes for them to arrive at her apartment. To his surprise, it was a rather plain, almost seedy-looking building, with plastic pot plants and a hideous sofa in the lobby. The elevator smelled like cheap perfume, and he noticed a discarded baby sock lying in the corner.
They got off on the fifteenth floor. She led him through dingy corridors, to a battered door right at the end. Some comic genius had carved a stylistic representation of male genitalia right beneath the number plate. Roger was beginning to regret his decision as he stepped into the apartment, but there was no turning back. Red locked the door and flipped on the light. He caught sight of something in a cage in the corner.
“Is that a platypus?” he asked, before falling to the ground.
“I have to do this, Fena.”
“P—promise me you’ll come back,” he said.
“Of course I will,” was her ready reply.
They were standing on the docks of Berecak, watching the sun sinking behind the ocean. Seagulls flew in circles around them, but for once, Fennen couldn’t find space in his heart to be annoyed at their presence. She was leaving him to go on a long journey to a country where she was definitely not welcome. He could lose her, but she had to do this. There was nothing he could do but wait, and pray that she would be safe.
“I’ll be waiting for you.”
Fennen stared at the book in front of him. He’d been looking at the same word for ten minutes, trying to chase embarrassing memories away. In his head, parallel to the other thoughts, he could hear Eskarne snorting with disbelief. A wet coolness collected along his left side, giving way to warmth as Eskarne’s top half appeared beside him. Fennen could feel her trying to pull her legs out, but as usual, everything below the hips stayed firmly meshed together.
“How do you think they’re still alive?” he asked. “Redlin… she’s got to be at least a hundred and twenty years old. And my daughter would be,” Fennen thought for a moment, “eighty-five? I suppose that’s alright, but Redlin?”
“Candice said she looked young. Well, beautiful.”
“And I ran into a Globbly four days ago.”
Their minds jumped through various thoughts, eventually landing on the same idea at once.
Eskarne pulled herself back into Fennen’s body. He put the book on the kitchen table, stood up and walked up the two flights of stairs to his little book room. It remained exactly as he left it, with Creatures of Earth still open on the table. The dust had taken the form of a miniature dragon, which he destroyed with an absent-minded hand flick. Sooner or later, he would have to get rid of that excess magic, but at that moment, he had to know.
He scanned through one page while Eskarne read the other. His hands moved quickly, flipping, checking indexes and eventually slamming the huge tome shut. Fennen pulled a much smaller, tattered book from the shelf. The gold title had long since flaked off, but the indentations were still visible, revealing it to be one of few off-world books that Fennen had retained. It took him five minutes to find the section he was looking for, and a few more to finish reading it all. This done, he went back downstairs and found a box of ginger snaps.
A few minutes later, Fennen had discarded the box, having found the ginger snaps too hard to chew through. He put on his jacket, locked the back door and walked out into the night.
Harry watched Funny Lady pull out the contents of the stranger’s pockets. She counted several strips of paper, laying them down according to colour, leaving everything else in a messy pile on the dining table. Once this was completed to her satisfaction, Funny Lady picked up the poking stick and walked over to Harry’s cage. She didn’t stop bothering him until he made a large hole to the left of the cage, at which point, she dragged the stranger’s body over and shoved him through. To Harry’s surprise, she carefully sealed the hole before disappearing into her bedroom.
Fennen buried his hands deep into his jacket as he walked towards the bus shelter. Ten minutes of conversation had resulted in absolutely nothing, and now, he would have to wait half an hour for the next bus. A long, cold half hour. Damn the MagRIA, he thought. Damn their secrets, and their impossibly loyal wizards, and damn Clarence Phillips, too. Sitting with his back against the cold plastic walls of the bus shelter, Fennen considered all the terrible things he would do to Phillips if he ever got the chance. Was he supposed to deal with this with guesswork?
In the darkness, he heard a dull thump. He looked around, but, seeing nothing, allowed himself to fall back into a violent reverie.